Farmer, Frances (1913–1970)

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Farmer, Frances (1913–1970)

American actress whose tragic life became the subject of the movie Frances . Born September 19, 1913, in Seattle, Washington; died of cancer on August 1, 1970, in Indianapolis, Indiana; daughter of Lillian (Van Ornum) Farmer and Ernest Farmer; sister of Edith Farmer Elliot ; married Leif Erickson (an actor), in 1936 (divorced 1942); married Alfred Lobley, in 1954 (divorced 1957); married Leland Mikesell, in 1958 (divorced the same year); no children.

After studying drama at the University of Washington, made her screen debut (1936) amid expectations of future stardom; dislike of the studio system and criticism for her involvement in left-wing causes during the so-called "Red Scare" (1930s–1940s) exacerbated alcohol and drug addictions and led to several rebellious incidents well-covered in the tabloid press; eventually declared "mentally incompetent" by court order, spent 11 years in a series of institutions, often under horrific conditions, and was exposed to a number of unproven, experimental treatments before being declared "cured" and released in the early 1950s; appeared in only one film after her release, worked at a series of odd jobs, and hosted a local television show in Indianapolis, Indiana, before the effects of her previous psychiatric treatments and the return of her alcoholism permanently ended her working years.

Filmography:

Too Many Parents (1936); Come and Get It (1936); Border Flight (1936); Rhythm on the Range (1936); Exclusive (1937); Ebb Tide (1937); The Toast of New York (1937); Ride a Crooked Mile (1938); South of Pago Pago (1940); Flowing Gold (1940); World Premiere (1941); Badlands of Dakota (1941); Among the Living (1941); Son of Fury (1942); The Party Crashers (1958).

On the evening of January 27, 1958, millions of Americans watched as one of the nation's most popular television shows, "This Is Your Life," prepared to examine the personal triumphs of another guest. But there was something odd about the elegant, well-dressed woman who was that evening's subject, something disturbing. Twenty years previous, Frances Farmer had been a familiar face on movie screens across the country, promoted as a formidable rival to Carole Lombard . But now, as she stared blankly at host Ralph Edwards and answered his questions in an expressionless monotone, and as the usual parade of high school teachers and old college chums produced no discernible effect on her, it seemed that the vivacious, intelligent actress of two decades before had become as flat as the TV screens on which her blurry image now appeared. Something was missing, but it would be years before the story of what had been stolen from her, and how it had been taken, would be known.

Unlike the ghostly presence of 1958, the Frances of childhood could hardly help attracting attention. She was an exceptionally beautiful child; but almost as striking were her outspoken opinions and her penchant for sometimes brutal honesty. It was a trait she had inherited from her mother, Lillian Van Ornum Farmer , well known around town for, among other things, demanding the closing of bakeries whose products Lillian did not deem nutritionally adequate and condemning the Seattle school board for allowing Communism to be taught in the classroom. Lillian was, in fact, as ardent in her anti-Communism as she was in her jingoistic enthusiasm for America. She had even produced a strain of chicken she had bred from a Rhode Island Red, a White Leghorn, and an Andalusian Blue, which she called the "Bird Americana," and which she very seriously proposed should replace the eagle as the new national emblem. It was no wonder, Seattle gossiped, that Lillian's first husband had left her.

Equally unusual was Lillian's choice for her second husband, a lawyer from Minnesota who came to stay at the boarding house she ran to support herself and a daughter after her divorce. Ernest Farmer was a left-leaning liberal who took to defending in court the labor organizers of the International Workers of the World, the Communist-inspired "Wobblies" intent on unionizing the shops and factories owned by Seattle's wealthy and conservative upper class. Lillian and Ernest managed their political differences well enough to produce a son and their first daughter, Edith, before Frances arrived on September 19, 1913. But the marriage was already in trouble by then and foundered completely when Frances was seven. Ernest moved out of the Farmers' West Seattle house in 1920, visiting on weekends and remaining very much in the background of Frances' life.

My future is very vague as yet—I don't have anything definite in mind.
—Frances Farmer, after her release, 1944

Frances Farmer became nationally famous years before she ever stepped in front of a camera, when she was a junior at West Seattle High School and wrote an essay in which she baldly asserted that "God was gone." Relating how her prayer to recover a lost hat had been answered while Providence failed to save a friend from dying in a car accident, Frances wrote that "God was such a useless thing. It seemed such a waste of time to have Him." The essay won a writing contest and set off a storm of protest. "Seattle Girl Denies God and Wins Prize!" reported a shocked Seattle Star and Times, a story the national press found too good to pass by. Within weeks, Frances Farmer had been dubbed the "Bad Girl of West Seattle" and was being denounced from pulpits across the country. "If the young people of this city are going to hell," fulminated one Baptist minister in Seattle, "Frances Farmer is surely leading them there." At 18, Farmer was already an outsider and under intense scrutiny.

It seemed she had found a safe haven when she arrived at the University of Washington in 1932, the same year her parents were officially divorced. Her sanctuary was the school's drama department where, she learned, acting allowed one to say the most shocking things with impunity. The excited talk among the school's drama department, as it was for optimistic young actors across the county, was of New York's daring Group Theater, an experimental company formed in reaction to more commercial theater companies like the Theater Guild. Fascinated by the difficult social themes tackled by the Group Theater in plays like Clifford Odets' Waiting For Lefty, Farmer vowed that she would not be happy until she could act with The Group. One of her professors had no doubt she'd make it to New York after directing her in one of the school's student offerings. "Whatever it is that makes a star, she had it," he later said, "and you knew it the minute you looked at her." Her work even attracted the attention of Seattle's professional theater critics, one of whom wrote of the "divine, intangible maturity of her acting that is destined for the lights of Broadway."

But it was the clash of ideologies, rather than the theater, that brought her to New York in 1934, in the midst of the infamous "Red Scare" of the 1930s. Washington State's long history of labor unrest provided a fertile ground for the burgeoning American Communist Party, the successor to the "Wobblies," idealistic in its fervent belief that Communism was the economic savior of the lower classes and that the workers' paradise being created in the Soviet Union should be duplicated in the United States. College campuses were the logical starting point for the cause, and college arts and drama departments seemed particularly suited to the effort. Farmer's drama coach, Sophie Rosenstein , was in fact an enthusiastic party member. It was Rosenstein who convinced Frances to allow her name to be used in a subscription drive by The Voice of Action, the Seattle Communist newspaper. When the paper's gratitude for aiding the cause took the form of a free trip to Russia, the ranks of conservative authority closed ever tighter against Frances, her own mother among them. Lillian told a Seattle newspaper that although she couldn't prevent her daughter from going to Moscow, "the dagger of Communism has struck deep into America. If I must sacrifice my daughter to Communism," she said, "I hope other mothers save their daughters before they are turned into radicals in our schools." The same newspaper that had been outraged by Frances' atheism three years earlier now trumpeted "Coed Determined to Act for Reds!" Farmer published a disclaimer stating that her trip to the Soviet Union was strictly to study the acting techniques that formed the basis for much of the new work being done in American theater. "The chance to view first hand one of the ten most important theatrical centers is the best thing that could happen to me," she wrote, promising to give America an "unbiased report" on the state of affairs in Russia when she returned.

One of the few fortunate aspects of the trip was that Farmer was able to visit the Group Theater on a stopover in New York in April of 1935, during which she met founders Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg, as well as Odets himself. Dogged by reporters, Frances finally set sail for Russia, was much photographed marching in Moscow's May Day parade, and returned to New York in late May to report that she had found Russia fascinating

and that it was a "marvelous place for art." Although she emphasized that she had gone to Moscow because of her interest in the theater, there was no outright denouncement of Communism. Indeed, Farmer said, her sympathies were with the Russian people, another frank statement she was forced to defend.

Perhaps judging it unwise to return to the critical atmosphere of conservative Seattle, Frances chose to stay in New York on her return from Russia and began making the rounds of agents and advertising agencies, which resulted in a few modeling jobs before she was signed by Shepard Traube, an agent with close ties to Hollywood. Traube got her a screentest for Paramount. "You couldn't take your eyes off her," reported Paramount's New York talent chief after watching the test, predicting that Frances Farmer had the potential to become a very big star indeed. By October of 1935, Farmer was on the Paramount lot in Hollywood as part of its stable of hopeful young actresses. But she immediately formed a strong dislike for the humbug and fakery of the Hollywood dream machine and complained that film acting was not serious acting. Paramount, however, was willing to put up with the outspoken behavior of a young woman with such remarkable screen potential. Less than six months after signing her, the studio cast her in the ingenue role in Too Many Parents, a 1936 comedy set at a military school which performed well at the box office precisely because of Farmer's reputation. Even Frances' surprise marriage in Yuma, Arizona, in February of 1936, to one of the studio's matinee idols, Wycliffe Anderson, failed to permanently damp Paramount's enthusiasm. (Anderson would later change his name to Leif Erickson, pursue a mediocre career in films, and finally make his mark with television audiences in the 1960's series "High Chaparral.")

But Farmer's frustration with the film business was apparent and detrimental. After playing opposite Bing Crosby in Rhythm on the Range, she told an interviewer that she had no idea what the film was about while she was shooting it. "I was just the tall, skinny dame," she said. "It was a long, sweet nightmare for me." Even her breakthrough film, Come and Get It, failed to elicit much respect from its leading lady. While the film's original director, Howard Hawks, recognized Farmer's talent, his replacement found her pugnacious attitude difficult to control. "The nicest thing I can say about Frances Farmer is that she's unbearable," William Wyler complained when the picture was completed, while Frances told a friend that "acting with Wyler is the nearest thing to slavery." Nor would Frances buckle down to the platitudes and artificial smiles at the film's premiere in her home town. "Remember me? I'm the freak from West Seattle High," she said icily to one of the Baptist ministers who had spoken out against her five years earlier over her controversial high school essay, but was now eager to be photographed with her; and when a conservative Congressman who had criticized her publicly for her Communist sympathies strode onto the stage with hand extended, she called him a hypocrite and walked away. "She talked directly, frankly, and at times, with a touch of sarcasm," one reporter noted tactfully.

By the time she completed work on Exclusive, a drama set at a big city newspaper, her future as Hollywood's next female superstar seemed assured. But the more secure her position became, the more puzzling was her behavior to Hollywood insiders. She lived unglamorously with her husband in a small, unpretentious cottage in the canyons above more fashionable Bel Air, drove an old rattletrap of a car around town, dressed as she pleased, and had no compunctions about using in public the vulgarisms for which she was notorious in private. "She…thinks movie gossip is blah, and will give up all salary boosts ever heard of if they'll give her a decent picture to play in," one journalist wrote after being granted a rare interview. The studio bristled again when Farmer talked freely with Collier's magazine about her admiration for the Soviet Union, the deplorable conditions under which California's migrant farm workers labored, and her sympathies for the Loyalist cause in the Spanish Civil War. By the end of 1936, Paramount thought it wise to grant Frances' demand to spend the summer on the legitimate stage back East.

Her natural talent for the stage brought her good reviews in two summer stock productions in suburban New York and, more important, an invitation from Harold Clurman to star in the Group Theater's premiere of a new play by Clifford Odets, Golden Boy. Her performance was universally praised, giving a much-needed boost to the financially strapped Group, and Farmer found herself the toast of Manhattan during that fall of 1937, even as resentment against her in Hollywood grew. There, she was seen as a traitor by the more conservative elements in the film industry who were deeply suspicious of her attachment to a theater company that counted several Communists among its membership. Some film historians have suggested that a right-wing alliance of industry and political conservatives undertook a subversive campaign to topple her, an assertion that has never been more than an elusive theory, but it is true that Frances' triumph in New York was the beginning of the end.

At the very least, it certainly seemed as if Paramount wanted to punish her for her desertion. The studio recalled her to appear in a Bpicture that was far below her former status. Worse yet, Walk a Crooked Mile, a western with leaden dialogue and cardboard characters, starred Leif Erickson, from whom Farmer was now estranged. (A divorce would be finalized in 1952.) A return to the safety of the stage failed to improve the situation: her next two productions with the Group closed after just a few performances each. A disastrous affair with Clifford Odets left Farmer so depressed that she failed to appear for rehearsals for a Theater Guild production of Fifth Column, adapted from an Ernest Hemingway story. The show had to be canceled because of her absence, earning her the enmity of the only group of professionals who had accepted her.

"The highbrow Frances Farmer, who found Hollywood so beneath her a few years ago, is playing, of all things, Calamity Jane," sniffed gossip queen Louella Parsons , referring to Farmer's appearance in Badlands of Dakota, her next assignment from Paramount. Parsons refrained, however, from mentioning the rumors of Frances' increasingly odd behavior. She dropped completely out of sight for a month in mid-1941, for example, telling a reporter when she re-emerged that she had taken time off at an isolated cabin in Washington State to recuperate from a heavy work load. The word on the Hollywood grapevine, however, was that Frances had suffered a severe breakdown and had actually spent the time at her mother's house. Her deep depression after the bombing of Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 added further credence to the reports that Frances Farmer had "gone crazy." Although Farmer's alcoholism was by now common knowledge, most people were unaware of her addiction to the Benzedrine the studio had given her to control her weight, an amphetamine which, taken in sufficient quantities, can induce schizophrenia-like behavior.

She seemed to recover her balance while filming what would soon become her bestknown film after Come and Get It, a historical drama called Son of Fury in which she played opposite Tyrone Power. But on the night of October 9, 1942, after finishing work on the picture, Farmer was arrested in Santa Monica on charges of drunken driving. Although she had been stopped for driving in a wartime "dim-out" zone with her headlights on, the arresting officer reported she was intoxicated, was driving without a license, and was extremely abusive toward him. She was never given a breath test, either at the scene or at the police station, was never allowed to call an attorney, and was found guilty at a hearing which issued a six-month suspended jail term. Louella Parsons led the press charge in reporting the incident, provoking Farmer to leave town by accepting an offer of work in a Mexican film.

It was an unfortunate decision. In her haste, Frances had failed to read the script and discovered on her arrival in Mexico City that the film was little more than an amateur production. Trying desperately to free herself from the picture and suffering from dysentery, she was spirited to the border by American Embassy officials and left in a motel just inside the United States. Parsons now reported that not only had Frances Farmer been deported from Mexico but that she had been committed to a "sanitarium." Farmer publicly repudiated the story and tried to tell the Hollywood press what had really happened, but by now it was too late. "You have to realize that they were out to get Frances, and she knew it," scriptwriter Dalton Trumbo said many years later, after he himself had been forced out of the business during the McCarthy era. Trumbo identified "they" as "the cops," and the reason for their pursuit of Frances as "the political thing, the migrant worker thing. You name it."

The end came when Farmer attacked a hairdresser on the set of a low-budget picture and dislocated the woman's jaw, behavior consistent with the effects of high doses of amphetamines. Charged with assault, Farmer was taken to jail after the police who came to arrest her had to forcibly subdue her in the face of flying fists and kicking legs. In court the next morning, Frances was captured on film by the press with her hair hanging loosely around her face and her clothes torn and rumpled; her sarcastic replies to the judge's questions were also widely reported. Again denied a lawyer, Frances' sudden sprint across the courtroom toward a pay phone and the subsequent image of burly policemen dragging her from the room were prominently featured on the front pages of the next day's newspapers, as were photographs of her strait-jacketed in a jail cell as she began a six-month sentence.

But the jail term was cut short. Instead, Farmer was placed without her consent in a sanitarium after a psychiatrist received permission to interview her. Dr. Thomas Leonard had followed her case in the newspapers, he said, and might be able to help her. Leonard later reported to the court that Frances had been "hostile and uncooperative" during his meeting with her, and showed signs of what he called "manic depressive psychosis, probably the forerunner of a definite dementia praecox"—a diagnosis that would be meaningless by today's standards. Leonard declared that, in his opinion, Frances Farmer was insane, while Lillian told a court hearing that her daughter was "unbalanced from her past years' experience of frustration in her career." At the end of January 1943, Farmer was taken to the Screen Actors' Guild sanitarium, La Crescenta, just outside Los Angeles. The only protest lodged against her confinement came, not from Hollywood, but from New York, where actors from the Group Theater and the Theater Guild signed a petition demanding her release. It was ignored by the court.

Farmer's great misfortune was to enter the psychiatric care system at a time of experimentation in new treatment therapies and few safeguards against patient abuse. One of the new therapies being tested was insulin shock, in which massive amounts of injected insulin were thought to overwhelm the brain's circuitry and somehow re-order it into more "normal" patterns. Insulin shock is much discredited today, but in Farmer's time it was seen as a promising new treatment that she was given up to three times a week, with her parents' consent. By the fall of 1943, she had lost the ability to concentrate or to remember recent events, common side effects of such therapies. But she was clear-headed enough to successfully escape from La Crescenta by scaling a wall and making her way to her half-sister's home nearby, where she called her mother and tearfully pleaded to come home. Lillian, who professed alarm at her daughter's condition, demanded her release from the sanitarium on the grounds that Frances had never been legally declared insane and could not be held against her parents' wishes.

Ernest Farmer later wrote that Frances appeared "pale, gaunt, and weak…obviously distraught" when she arrived home in Seattle. She seemed to recover during the winter of 1943–44, however, while Lillian, without Frances' knowledge, contacted studios in Hollywood and told them her daughter was looking for work. While Frances' refusal to return to the environment which had affected her so severely can be seen as a sign of her recovered mental health, her mother was shocked when Frances turned down the offer of a small film role. Arguments between them grew increasingly violent, sometimes physically so, and by the spring of 1944 Lillian became convinced that the doctors were right and that Frances had fooled them all with her apparent return to sanity. On the morning of March 21, 1944, as Frances was eating her breakfast, three orderlies arrived at the house and spirited her off to Seattle's Harborview Hospital. The day before, Lillian had sworn out a complaint in which she said she could no longer handle her daughter's physically abusive behavior. She recounted one incident in which Frances refused Lillian's request to turn down the radio by grabbing her mother's wrists and pushing her into a chair. "My arms became black and blue," Lillian testified. "I realized at once that she needs institutional care, as I am entirely unable to control her at home." This time, the court legally declared Frances insane, identifying her in documents by her married name of "Mrs. F.E. Anderson."

Conspiracy theorists point out that the judge who presided over the hearing had been an ultra-conservative Seattle politician before moving to the bench and had spoken out against "the Bad Girl from West Seattle" for her notorious high school essay, for her trip to Russia, and for her left-wing sympathies. He was also said to be an important figure in a shadowy group called "The American Vigilantes," which staged violent union-busting raids during the 1930s and spied on groups suspected of being Communist fronts. Equally odd was the behavior of the attorney appointed by the court to represent Farmer, who signed a document waiving Farmer's right to a jury trial as Frances was interviewed by the psychiatrist appointed by the court, Donald Nicholson. Frances, Nicholson wrote in his report to the bench, was "excited, arrogant and inclined to be resistive" during their meeting and became "exceedingly vulgar and profane" as the interview progressed. Nicholson declared her insane and recommended the court commit her to the Washington State Hospital for the Insane at Steilacoom, a forbidding, turreted institution perched on a cliff overlooking Puget Sound. It had been built a century earlier and had never been renovated.

Except for a ten-month period from July of 1944 to May of 1945, Farmer spent the next six years at Steilacoom under conditions so hideous that her story seems drawn from some 19th-century horror tale. She was repeatedly subjected without her consent to electroconvulsive therapy, commonly called "shock treatment"; to hydrotherapy, in which she was forced to spend hours immersed to the neck in ice cold water; and to a variety of experimental drug therapies which may have included LSD treatments. She lived in a filthy common room reserved for the violently insane, infested with rats and reeking with the stench of vomit and excrement. Even more horrifying was the fact that Steilacoom served as, in the words of one former orderly, "the whorehouse for Fort Lewis," a nearby military base for whose soldiers the hospital's guards would procure women from among the inmates. Her ten-month hiatus from Steilacoom, much of it spent under close observation at the rural ranch of an aunt in Nevada, ended with her escape and subsequent arrest as a vagrant. Nicholson, who had hailed her release as "a significant victory for the mental hygiene movement in Washington State," promptly convinced her parents to commit her once again. There were some who were not convinced Farmer was mentally ill. One was a nurse assigned to Frances' ward, who came to believe after numerous conversations

that Frances' bravery in the face of such disaster was proof of her sanity. "Pictures just didn't do justice to her," the nurse said many years later. "You don't know how beautiful she was unless you saw her in person." But the nurse's protest filed with hospital authorities only led to a reprimand and reassignment to another facility.

It is likely that during this second phase of her institutionalization Farmer became one of hundreds of patients given what was known as a "transorbital lobotomy." The procedure had been developed by Walter Freeman as a refinement on the even more drastic frontal lobotomy which had been in use for a decade. Freeman claimed that by inserting a surgical instrument, not unlike an ice pick, between a patient's eyeball and eye-socket and directly into the brain, thus severing several nerves in the frontal lobes, miraculous results could be achieved in patients whose behavior had become dangerously uncontrollable. The operation took just a few minutes, and Freeman was known to perform it on as many as 60 patients at a time. By the late 1940s, Freeman was much respected by the psychiatric establishment and had virtual carte blanche at any institution in the country. Sometime in late 1948 or early 1949, Freeman arrived at Steilacoom and asked to see Frances Farmer. After interviewing her in the company of several staff members, he administered shock treatments to her until she was unconscious and then asked to be left alone with the patient. What happened while the two were alone will never be known for sure, but it is likely that Freeman performed his operation.

The most telling indication that Farmer had become one of Freeman's victims was the almost immediate change in her behavior. She became quiet and obedient, and began to cooperate with her doctors instead of fighting them. She listened meekly as they described her previous behavior and became convinced that she had been a "sinner." She became, as she described it with some difficulty years later, "like a bowl of jelly, agreeable and pliable." In March of 1950, when Lillian suffered a stroke and had no one at home to look after her, doctors pronounced Frances Farmer cured and released her.

By 1953, after her mental competency had been confirmed by the courts and her civil rights restored, Frances got a job in the laundry of a Seattle hotel, began to date, and eventually married a civil engineer named Alfred Lobley in April of 1954. But Lobley had not counted on Frances' strange, erratic behavior and her continued fondness for alcohol. She disappeared after six months, turning up in northern California, where she took a job as secretary at a photography studio. Lobley knew nothing of her whereabouts until both her parents died—Lillian of a stroke in 1955, and Ernest the next year—and Social Security officials finally tracked Frances down. Lobley divorced her in 1957, but by then Frances had met a young entrepreneur named Lee Mikesell. It was Mikesell who stage-managed a peculiar, sad comeback for Frances, taking advantage of a growing popular interest in psychology and the interest in Lillian Roth 's account of her own recovery from depression, I'll Cry Tomorrow.

Farmer's first public appearance in nearly 15 years was on the "Ed Sullivan Show" in June of 1957, during which she sang two folk songs. Although the shock and drug treatments had seriously affected her ability to memorize lines, she managed to earn respectful reviews in a production of "The Chalk Garden" at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania and for an appearance on "Playhouse 90," a weekly network presentation of original drama. Then came the uncomfortable and embarrassing appearance on "This Is Your Life," followed by a small part in a teenage B-film amid complaints from the picture's director that she was drunk most of the time. In a series of confessional interviews in national magazines, Frances talked of divine punishment for her earlier behavior. "I shall always thank Him," she said. "I am very much in love and think that, from now on, life is going to be wonderful." But Mikesell, whom she had married early in 1958, divorced her later that year and sued her for $250,000 in management fees. After a summer stock production of "The Chalk Garden" closed unexpectedly early in Indianapolis, Farmer found herself stranded and broke in a strange city.

She spent her final years under the careful eye of a woman she befriended named Jeanira Ratcliffe and found a job introducing movies on the local television station in a weekly program called "Frances Farmer Presents." The show was canceled after six years because, some said, of Frances' drinking. Plagued by high blood pressure and ulcers, and nearly penniless after a scheme to start a cosmetics company with Ratcliffe failed, Farmer agreed to tape several hours of interviews with a writer who proposed writing her biography. But the project had barely got underway when she was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in April of 1970. Four months later, on August 1, Frances Farmer died and was buried in a simple grave in a small cemetery just outside Indianapolis.

There was a short flurry of interest in her career following her death. Films that Hollywood had withheld from circulation since the 1940s briefly resurfaced. A purported autobiography, Will There Really Be a Morning?, published the year after her death was actually written by Ratcliffe, based on the interviews Frances had recorded and what Ratcliffe could remember Frances telling her in their years together. It is floridly written and unreliable in its facts, but at least the horrors that Farmer endured during her incarceration finally reached a wide readership: the book was a bestseller. Frances' older sister Edith, who had been living in Hawaii during Frances' most troubled years and could speak of none of it firsthand, privately printed a rebuttal to Ratcliffe's book, in which she wrote she wanted to "set the record straight, to correct the salacious lies, half truths, defamation of character dealt our family members." Despite her geographical distance during those tortuous years, Edith claimed Frances had not undergone surgery of any kind and, like Lillian, blamed her sister's illness on Communists in general and on The Group in particular.

The fact was that Frances Farmer was a non-conformist at a time when American society, beset by social upheaval and moral challenges, ostracized anyone who strayed too far from the path and when Hollywood was in the throes of a conservative backlash against its freewheeling past. Whether or not some sort of conspiracy against her existed, there is no doubt the film community, as well as her own family, turned its back on her when she refused to come to heel. "They wanted to bust that kid wide open," as Dalton Trumbo put it. The great tragedy was that after Frances Farmer ventured too far into unknown territory, there was no one to lead her home again.